jan 14 Mon

This is when you rest. Like a hair salon. Well actually, a barber shop. Always, so curious, they seemed to be closed on Monday.

But I now after a Sunday of preaching that today you take a rest.

Which I seemed to do with this blog this weekend.

Bren, limping, was nonetheless inserted in the game. The O'Neal kids are fast. But it was good to have him play. I mean, mine was a total camp out in the basement and write. The project of baseball. Skip the meeting. But, as 11:30 rolled around, we found out where to go. I e'd a coach--which turned out to be the wrong one--to find out when the game was. No reply, I thought the heck with it. But, he did limp down the court and fired up a three. They called it a two but it was nuthin' but net...and so then I went to the umpire meeting. Not a complete waste and wash.

Today's post is education:

Phil Koch to retire…why does this matter, why does this mean anything? Except there was a pile of papers on the floor. Where son Brendan has thrown his materials that have been graded with red ink and purple ink and a few hand-drawn stars and I happen to see the flier that is the news of the Millard District. Let’s call it what it exactly is: MILLARD in huge font then below that it has BULLETIN BOARD: newsletter is published twice monthly during the school year scrolled below the masthead. So, an old educator myself—I mean, come on, it’s almost ridiculous—I find myself, cleaning clearing my basement area, piles of paper and notes and old magazines, getting ready for bench arrival the food arrival and what do I come across but the last school board notice from Lynch Public Schools. I could handle reading it. However, even after almost 15 years, I still can’t look at the phone number or the address at the top of the page. This, thinking back (and I’ve thought this before, and congratulate myself every time I think of it), was a number I never called. I never ever once called the school.
I remember, the last day there, when my duties were done, when Larry Eilers had finished sweeping down the floor and adding a mixture of linseed oil or something to make the wood floors of the creaky old building shine, and then, always coming to school just at the end of the Paul Harvey broadcast that finished at 7:25 a.m., a personage that I loathed, a voice I cringed at such that I would shut my door making sure I didn’t have to hear a breath of it and sometimes Eilers would see me walking by, hands in my ears, look up from his broom and nod his head and greet me. “Heard you had some high-octane stuff last night” he commented one time stepping into my long but somewhat narrow little office and then, another time, another one of the quite personal questions, the spokesperson for the town, near school year’s end, leaning on his huge push broom, “Where are you gonna have that baby?” Kath so preg, so huge I had to pull her off the couch. Now jovial end of school year because I was so close to a job offer miles and miles south I said, “Oh,” smiling I was, off hand, “maybe somewhere on the interstate.” Did Larry smile in return and shake his head? The only thing I remember doing in outright and utter defiance was grabbing the school bell that was outside the double front door of the school and ringing it a couple times and walking on over to my formerly pink house—the town having some sort of predilection for pink painted houses in garish shades—and never looking back.
It was a May meeting, I was pleased to see, the last one for the school year. It was the only one I ever remember keeping the notes about or ever bothering to read. I read over such silly things as salaries and awards and lunch money prices and all sorts of other budget items and the school board members and suddenly some of their faces appeared, sitting at the table, munching on the thick sweet rolls the cooks had prepared for us, administrators and board members, in the kitchen of the school cafeteria that was a long hallway and a few doors down, earlier in the day. The gym and cafeteria, an edition to the old brick 3-story school house boasting prominence as the town’s biggest building (unless of course you didn’t included a grain elevator south of town), was where quiet cooks dressed in white had prepared meals for young mouths for years. Even though I was still the building principal, and still sat at one end of the table, the Sup Ben on the other, I noted how I was written down merely as one of the guests in attendance. And that Brent Riddle, who flew in mid-year as music teacher, deign lived in a long trailer down the road apiece from the school, was listed, along with the other teachers—90% or so, 50% of the administrators—who would stay in town, as principal and secondary teacher in the next year’s assignments. I also remember the banquet or something they were having at year’s end, a big end of year gala how I deign sit at the far end table, so far from the middle and the podium as to be as insignificant as possible.
(And you can’t believe how delighted I was to find that Principal Riddle had kicked a kid in the head, his mystery solved, at some point in the following year and, as the saying goes, “Didn’t get on reg’lar.” And Sup Ben, later admitting to me in one of our two conversations, how things “didn’t work out.”)
Well, given my erudite loquacious nature, you’d think that I’d at least call Ben, if just to say howdy. Well, maybe I did call once. But I called the Butte school, where he was school sup halftime and, that year at least, had filled in half-time at both schools, Lynch and Butte, the school board thinking they’d made a great grand deal, a bargain all around. (How, to this day, something that could really never be fully explained or fathomed: Spencer, the nearest town to the west, held a grudge, of sorts, I guess, against Lynch and so Ben, sup at a town not that much further west, Butte, site of the proposed nuclear waste facility, always was faced with the prospects of driving through the gently growing town of Spencer and then onto Lynch, shaking his head no doubt along the way, this strange leap frog, reading over and over the handmade signs that warned against any kind of nuclear nonsense to leak into the Sandhill’s aquifers, the huge underground lake, and kill off the inhabitants in the slowly dying towns. Spencer, of course, not to be outdone, leapfrogged Butte and picked up a town west of Butte, the dying town of Naper, as far from Spencer as Lynch was to Butte. Yet everyone was indeed happy at this intense hatred and animosity that flourished and prospered and thus the arrangement worked very well.) That school board members of the four schools had displayed so much financial acumen in their mostly dead and decaying towns it really was two for the price of one.
You just can’t beat that now can you?
No, I think I called Ben for an address or was it to get his permission to use him as a reference? I’m not sure. All I know is, I never ever called the Lynch school where I’d been hung out to dry, dear wife eight and one-half months pregnant. I just rang the school bell and walked on, over to my small gray house, that used to be a bright Pepto pink, never looking back.
Oh, I would’ve called the school, I’m sure. I’m sure I would’ve called and one of the secretaries, Tammy or Deb, would’ve answered, shooing students in and out of the office, with a chirpy “Oh hello Mr. Hart how are you doing? Let me see if he’s in. Oh no, I’m so sorry, he’s tied up in a meeting right now, is there a number where you can be reached?”
No, I definitely would’ve called except one afternoon I came into Ben’s office. I was collegial and congenial; after all, we were both administrators, you see. Except one day skirting by the secretaries’ office (never put them to work, did I; I had no idea what I should tell them to do) I heard Ben say, consolingly, ‘Oh, you’ll find something. Something’ll turn up.” Then he’d give out this harsh German laugh that was more like a bark. Did he say the other man’s name? I’m not sure, but I somehow discerned that it was the former Lynch Eagle superintendent, calling, searching, hung out to dry by the ole town; looking for answers, for help, for a job.
I remember, looking at the school yearbook, how the previous year, for some celebration—Homecoming was it? Some parade they were always fashioning, some celebration or Halloween Prankstership they had him in a clown outfit or a jailbird outfit or something. He was just standing there, looking silly, looking on with big ears. Yes, now I remember, he was dressed as a rabbit. And he was the school superintendent. (Please don’t tell me he had his doctorate; I will slit my wrists.) So basically, that’s what they thought of their educators: as clowns, as rabbits, as jailbirds.
I remember at one of the early school year festivities they asked if I wanted to sit on the plank so they could throw and dump me in the tank of water in a full cold cattle tank. Sure, I said, caught up in the very spirit of the thing, why not. Promptly, I saw grown men grab a baseball, wind up, and promptly dunk me in the water tank. I remember how it’d been a cold cloudy day; I immediately got a severe cold and coughed my way to school for a couple days.
No, by school year’s end, I’d wised up to their tricks. And right then and there I said, you’ll never ever catch me calling that Lynch school, no way.
Even today, I can’t even look at the number. The phone number. I never called. Not once.
And thereby hangs a tale.
BUT LET’S TURN OUR DISCUSSION TO that very quite middling time of when I was long-term sped sub at Kiewitty a decade later. Another era, more or less and I noted from the BULLETON BOARD that below the lead paragraph of Employees of the Month Named there is…no, that section is Kudos: Don Feree, math teacher at Millard West High School, has been named a Star of Education. It’s on the backside. The info I just happened to come across. The title is Board Briefs: A look of what happened at the board of education meeting.
THE LAST COLUMN, and see, like I inferred above, am an old educator, scribing through some worthless old assignments, forgotten grades, baleful urgings for attention.
Beneath PERSONNEL ACTION
A resignation was accepted for Ann Huxtable-Scates, media specialist at Hitchcock Elementary School.
A leave of absence was rescinded for Amanda Hegge, resource teacher at Reeder Elementary School.
And then finally, FINALLY, without further ado about nothing:
Voluntary (drum roll) early separations were approved for Jeanne Backlund, family and consumer science teacher at Central Middle school…Phil Koch, principal at Kiewit Middle School….There were nine total, in bold face, in alphabetical order.
There you have it. The big guy is going to the retirement pie, the end of career sky. Never once suspecting that a scathing critique (please see above) has been prepared for him.
Ironic, because this was just before I stumbled across the Lynch school board notes. And double triple ironic because the front part of the Millard Bulletin has, at the lower right corner, a fact that this is “Nebraska School Board Recognition Week, January 22-28. A little icon says, “Citizen Leaders.”
This fanfare announced and recorded: January 17, 2006 No. 9
And now we have to take the D-train to the Bronx.
South Bronx
I stepped out and thru the window of the science classroom and looked at the New & Blue & suddenly there was the South Bronx starring at me—the concreted up windows, the empty quart beer bottle in front of the door of Wade JHS that was brown and empty & maybe it could be pushed over by the wind.
Out of the corner of my left eye was the table of periodic elements.
Leaving, see a car jacked up, hood up, a few people crawling underneath.
Now it’s a new blue track then a soft grade of a hill and two-story split-level round houses with dark teak wood surrounding the grass running up the short hill.
I looked at the soft landing. Mrs. Jespers steps out and sets down a full flower basket. I hear the science teacher and turn and look. “Take out your notebooks,” the tall science teacher says to the class. I return to the window, I return to the Bronx.
“They’re always workin’ on their cars,” Steve Wasserman said, a mixture of resentment, scorn & reporting in his voice, driving out of the South Bronx neighborhood, away from Wade JHS where they’d commenced a day of instruction, no concern of theirs any longer.
The small chain that was attached to the grill.
“Why’d they do that?”
“Keep them from stealin’ the battery. After I got my battery stolen I had to get a chain,” Wass said. “It’s prob’ly in one of the cars there.”
A shout came from a window. There was a quart of beer next to a joint next to a pack of cigarettes.
It was both tantalizing and tempting.
It won when he stepped off W11th St. and onto the red brick that was the upper level of the park. A few men were sitting on benches. One of them looked over at him. He waved.
“Hey, Tex, get up a pound for a six-pack.”
It was camaraderie. He moved closer to the park benches.
“Hey, Nebraska, what’s up?”
“Not much.”
“You teachin’ ‘em anything or they just clowin’ around?”
The teacher, Tex, remembering how he’d talked with the uncles of a PR student after school that day and it had come out okay, was feeling slightly mo’ confident than usual. The kid had had the back of his head banged against the doorknob from the teacher’s push—a half-defense, a half-offense maneuver—and it had bled profusely. That Friday, the principal came into his classroom and suggested he leave the building early that day, accurately predicting the clan would become enraged, possible mayhem in the South Bronx classroom.
“Oh yeah,” he said, setting his brown satchel on the bench and looking at a few of Jerry Mudd’s companions sittin’ on the concrete table marked out in a chess or checkers grid that was never used but now upon which a few brown bags of wrapped around quart bottles which the teacher knew contained cold beer now sat stoically. Somebody earlier in the day had hustled over to the nearby Deli to make the purchase.
It could have been him.
“Hey Dom.”
Dom, a swarthy Italian, always a dull white apron girded about a protruding belly, looked up. His thick black wavy hair, one could imagine his forefathers stepping off the boat just last week with a young son who would learn English but in each and everyone there was a sound of the shore lapping up, breaking over the piers, voices over the waves.
“Hey, how’s it goin’?” Dom asked, not smiling, his eyes surveying the three narrow lanes of the small convenience store that was not naturally lit insofar as the afternoon sun that shone through the windows was drowned out by the neon stuck squarely into a false ceiling.
Afternoon sun, retreating to the west, shone brilliantly through the windows that looked out on what they called the bum’s park that resolutely hugged the intersection of Bleecker and Hudson streets.
“I gotta twelve pack.”
“Oh, okay.”
Tex didn’t know when he started getting credit at the Deli.
“You don’t have to hang me like that.”
“Your mama.”
“Your ma.”
He saw ruff n tuff neighborhood kids kiss each other, leaning their body against the concrete bank, near the coffin-shaped concrete flowerbed where nothing ever grew as nothing was ever planted.
“Is that dirt Nebraska?” John Short had asked.
Short had overheard Tex discuss his marijuana growing operation outside his apt. window.
“I got my apt. fire escape,” he’d reported at the Horse. “I just planted some seeds and some tomatoes.”
Was that dirt brought from Nebraska? Short wanted to know.
“I’m gonna annex my apt. to Cuba,” John always said. Tex had sat down on the high stool and put his $10 bill on the bar at the White Horse Tavern.
“Nah,” Tex thought, feeling the cold against his throat, the hops ‘n barley risin’ to his lips and suddenly he was transformed to shellin’ corn outside the double-tiered corncrib & watchin’ the extra set of hired men his dad had requisitioned for extra duty that day, borrowin’ the help from a nearby farmer or a guy or two workin’ in the machine shop in town.
Tex, small for his age, and therefore had always to make amends, shoveled right along with the best of ‘em. After kickin’ down a wave of corn, the ears not having moved since harvest, now were lodged free from where the tall yellow Kelly Ryan elevator had transported them on a late October night and then left ‘em, a coyote howling in the hills, the stars brilliant in the sky.
He shoveled right next to the grown men, furiously shoveling, showing that he, too, was a man & should be regarded as such. He caught his breath a little in the shade as the cattle truck pulled away & saw a pile of split red corncobs; next to it was a pile of cornshucks they’d loader over the fence for the hogs—who come running and squealing—to stomp on and chew.
Dad had come back from town during the intermission with a six-pack of Hams beer in short stub bottles & the sight of the beer on the farm gave the young boy a start and he greedily drank his pop while the men drowned their beer.
Now he was a man at the White Horse Tavern; he’d known women & he’d known kid & he thought ruefully that that indeed was a good id Short had had.
But now a year or so later, he didn’t go to the bar anymore but drank with the bums and the boys in the park & surprised when they kissed each other on the lips.
It was his wont before the park stop was the stop at a small white Opera Deli that sat with its arms folded defiantly on the corner of Bleecker & Hudson.
He walked all tiered up having got off the subway of 7th Ave.; the smell & stall & clutter & wrap: that he could smell the floor where the vendors were & the sweet sickening smell of always makin’ popcorn they ate & and ran over & squealed for room to stomp on & chew; small sacks dropped & stepped on & left the pop corn bags and walked upon rolled up & through a lil gimmie grime a lil oily he wanted to bathe and feel like throwin’ up thinkin’ now about son Jeremy a bit of the ole salt washin’ up on the westernshore was an ocean Away.
Was he watchin' it as dark brown water on the Bank Street pier, the rectangular convection of drifting wood, held forth a ray of hope?
Tex looked west a lot of times those years, the sun setting behind the huge Maxwell coffee house sign. The abandoned pier to his left he could see gay boys dressed in black leather walkin’ in & out of an old metal building silently, in unison.
It all made him drink. He didn’t much care if he drank himself into oblivion.
The clang and grind of the subway train, the immutability of the city.
Why was he so cowardly? Why didn’t he or wouldn’t he go back out there and reclaim his son? But, what would be the point?
He had had to wear the Joe College suit, had made several promises. Still he hadn’t found a steady job.
“Hey, Tex, wake up. You look like you’re in a fog.”
“Wha huh. Oh yeah. I guess I was just thinking.
“Yeah, well quit ‘cher thinkin’ and gitme a beer.”
And another.
VVVVVV
He was workin’ on Rita, the gal from Ecuador, the Galapagos. She was just this checkout girl at the local D’Agastino’s. Because he was sans family, it was embarrassing almost to go in and check out his usual fare: tuna fish white and dark so he could mix the two and make himself a sandwich. He’d done this so often he could hardly look at it.
“Hi, how are you,” she would say, smiling.
“Fine,” he would return.
It must’ve been her after-school job because he suddenly began to see her more than once. She was always friendly to him.
The chatting continued and, believe it or not, he invited her to his apartment. He was surprised, when this off-hand comment was able to secure her visit.
She came up and she was not the rather diminutive girl in a D’Ag outfit but a shapely schoolgirl with breasts protruding. She was wearing a mini-skirt. He thought it was just a chat session, come up and visit and say hello, drink some soda or something.
It was that day but a little later when he began to help her with homework; the last part of the year, they began to kiss. It was just soft and harmless but he did get beneath the bra and saw like all senior girl’s in h.s. the uprightness of her breasts. They were brown, almost like it was a round brownie his mom used to make with just the touch of the hand or whiff of the finger, the towel draped around her shoulder, speeding about the kitchen with a stiff broom that punched the dirt he should’ve taken to NYC and remains of the farm her husband Jim and boy Ronnie had tracked in from the chores. (Mom said she could always tell what season it was by what was tracked in from the farm.)
Save Rita’s brownies had a little pink nipple in the middle that, while certainly not the sugar that was somewhere in the recess of the somewhat heavy timber but had, for its merit, a touch of the liveliness that, combined with the perfume the girl wore, quickly excited his loins and he felt sensation.
No, it was not the checkout girl from D’Agastino’s before him but a young woman smiling and beaming up at him.
“Hi, how are you?”
It was like she had a funny way of saying “are.” Like it was a word she’d just learned and liked to say it.
“Fine, come on in.”
Rita stepped into his third floor dark apt. with tall windows that faced the north. Tex was always trying to devise and discern ways to bring in more light. The two tall windows in the outside room looked out across the courtyard to the back of an old square brick building he learned was a printing factory long since closed.
Sometimes, and he never counted the times the large metal doors opened and slammed shut because it didn’t seem to be of any importance to him; he’d never hear the large metal door creak open yet was always mildly startled when it banged shut when moved by an unknown cause: a wind would come up from the Atlantic and work itself to New York Harbor and slowly, like a light vessel, move north. At that time, before he became convinced that the drunken state was best ship to be in, he’d hear the steady bang and clash of the large unfastened metal doors, spinning on their hinges, almost like a message he could not discern.
Like the lack of sun, it represented a condition in the apartment confines he could do nothing about.
When Rita was there, when other guests would come by, there was no need to worry about the noise on the other side of the courtyard. He betrayed the light problem by turning on many lights. They would glow furtively, almost in defiance.
It mattered little to Rita. It mattered even less to other visitors to his apartment that, Tex ruefully admitted, were far and few between.
Maybe it had something to do with the light.
“Have a seat.”
Nor was there much in the way of seating arrangements. It was another thing, like the absence of light; he didn’t like but could do little about. The small bench that his Uncle Frank’s friend Donald had given him his first months in NYC —along with a double-loaf toaster he need always watch—proved to be uncomfortable to sit on for very long. However, because it was of the right dimension to fit in the small corner of the apartment’s front room, medium-brown, diminutive, looking almost like it should be there, it possibly had the longest life of any of the furniture.
“Here?”
“Well, you can sit over there.” Tex gestured to the single bed. He secretly congratulated himself for making it. “It might be more comfortable.”
After Rita sat down, they chatted briefly before she had to get back to her 7th Ave. IRT subway to her home in Queens with her large family and strict parents.
Later, his last months in NYC, in the village, in the apt. with northern light: he thought of a day when, walking with Rita from D’Ag, he met up with a park regular who, while he was still in school, was able to hang on the outside fringes without getting too mixed up in any of the darker proceedings.
“Hey, Tex, how’re ya doin’?”
Later, he was again accosted.
“Hey, Tex, who was that pretty girl you were walkin’ with?”
“Oh,” Tex responded, putting a beer to his lips, trying to hide his pleasure, “just a friend I know.”
However, he thought how, walking with Rita past the bum’s park, the young Jewish student had had to take a second look and change his delivery.
“Hey, Tex, how’re you doin’?” replaced “Tex, the alcoholic teacher.”
It was one of the small advances in the increasingly hard tide of reality.
VVVVVV
“I need a place to crash.”
It was when the alcoholic teacher was trying to make to the most of it, traveling purposely everyday to the South Bronx. His intro to the park to a one Dennis Hanley months before had grown ponderous and threatening.
Later, “How come you’re not comin’ around no more.”
Later, “Don’t worry, I ain’t gonna take nothin’.”
He dreaded to hear the heavy steps coming up to his third floor apt., coming most foul to the back of the old building.
“Mudd’s dad said I can’t be crashin’ at their place ‘til the end of the month.”
Tex was sober. He didn’t like to drink during the school days and, for the most part, held hard to this pledge.
He woke up and saw that there was a large object on the floor by the small park bench no one had sat on for years for more than two minutes. He had thought, Please tell me last night’s sudden arrival was a strange dream: no, there was somebody there, curled in a fetal position. It was Hanley. All this time he’d implored Rita to spend the night; he winds up with a drunken Hanley.
He turned on the radio. WINS NEWS blared loudly; he showered and shaved and ate a quick breakfast banging and slamming but the large object on the floor remained inert. A good trek down Bleecker to 7th Ave. onto W4th St. to the 6th Ave. IND line awaited. He could almost hear the conductor’s voice announce, “D-train to the Bronx;” he could see the subway doors of the fairly new cars closing on riders reading their newspapers.
“You gotta go now.” He tapped the prone man firmly on the shoulder.
He was dressed in his South Bronx ammunition. A brief case. A pen in his pocket.
“Hey, what’s up, I ain’t gonna take nothin’.”
Hanley proceeded to get up and move straight to the kitchen and squeeze his way between the stove and the middle window that was the airway through which you could look down at the floors below and the one floor above. It was an airspace or air duct or airshaft that crowded the entryway between a gas burning stove and window that Hanley proceeded to lumber through.
For as drunk as he was the night before, Hanley remembered where his beer was. He stooped down to the small refrigerator upon which a dish container sat, opened the small door, moved his hand past a tuna fish sandwich and pulled out a beer from the bag he’d tossed there the night before.
Tex watched Hanley stand with a cold beer in his hands then lumber back though the narrow confines between the stove and the window and, having clearance, popped the top.
The fizz was light as the beer was cold.
Hanley strode past Tex the teacher without comment.
Tex could see the eastern light begin to lighten the brick of the dark factory across the courtyard, light indirectly the mechanical clock on the fireplace mantel. It told him it was time. He stood over a strange visitor, grasping tightly his satchel.
“I’ve got to go. You need to leave now.”
“Don’t worry,” Hanley said, hunching his shoulders, putting a beer to his lips. “I ain’t gonna take nothin’.”
Tex opened the door and moved down the stars; unsettled feelings of fear and regret rumbled in his gut. He couldn’t get it out of his mind through the teaching day, standing over his recalcitrant South Bronx learners, watching the clock.
It was near June. The days were getting lighter and longer, the cobbled Bank Street before him began to dance with morning light.
He knew Dennis the Menace would be around again.
VVVVV
In large part, he saw how he’d brought much of it upon himself. He thought he could handle the drinking but other trips to the fog pond hadn’t helped.
In fact, he was beginning to feel proud of himself.
At last the neighborhood—insofar as the small circle of friends—was his.
“Hey, Tex, what’s up?”
“Not much, how’re ya doin’?”
“Still drivin’ that limousine?”
“Oh yeah,” the young man replied, “Still doin’ it.”
In fact, while it was beginning to get easier for him to traverse the general confines of NYC and shoot his snout of the black Caddy to the airport, it was beginning to lose part of the thrill of newness. It was a job to do. He had to do it. It was to supplant his income from the teaching stage. However, when he should’ve been honorable and obey the law and send the money to the court of Dakota County and help pay for his child support, he deigned hold an infantile grudge, sending money in only sporadic bursts.
He thought of Mudd tellin’ him how Dennis had hurled a TV through the window.
They were all in the end room of the apartment. It’s where Tex had moved his bed, moving from the middle room where now sat his electric typewriter and his old sound system and some college textbooks.
Hanley shook his head.
“I told ’er if she didn’t shut up I was gonna do it,” Hanley said.
Mudd turned and looked at him. “Brand new color TV. Fifth Avenue apartment. Threw it right out the fucking window.” He shook his head, laughing—the sheer insanity.
“So, Nebraska, ya better be careful, otherwise Dennis ‘ll throw your TV out the window.”
Tex was gettin’ a buzz on. He looked at his small black and white TV on the floor. He rarely watched it. He wouldn’t really care that much. But just the violence of heaving it through one of the tall windows that faced out onto the courtyard was hard to picture. “I sure hope the hell not.”
He didn’t know if Hanley had squired any kids or not. He didn’t think so. While the teacher/limo driver was guilty on the support payments, wife abuse, he couldn’t see himself throwing a color TV out an apartment window on Fifth Avenue.
“That Dennis,” Mudd said, “he can get pretty crazy. That’s why he’s Dennis the Menace.
No, the young man thought. He’d never do that. That was insane. Those NYC people are just too crazy. It's high time to head back home.